


The Fibonacci Bear Sequence

by jazzfic



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-21
Updated: 2010-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-13 07:35:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/134679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penny has a visit from a schoolmate, with a kid in tow; observations are made about bears and numbers, and Sheldon makes a new friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fibonacci Bear Sequence

She's got the door open before the knocking ends, arms so tight around her friend that she barely hears the greeting, the laughter in her ear. "Penny!" Natalie says, voice bright but almost an admonishment. "Honey, you're kind of choking me here..."

"Come in, come in," Penny says, and leaps forward to help with the two bags on the hall floor. As she does she sees the dark curls and even darker eyes of a small child, clinging to Nat's jean clad legs. "Oh my god," she breathes, "look at you, sweetheart, you're like a whole new Zoe. You've gotten so big!"

She stands up, shaking her head. The expression on her face must be a good one because Nat laughs. "I know, she's growing by the second, I swear."

They eventually get into the apartment. Penny tries not to see it through her friend's eyes but she kind of does, and has to shrug despite the fact that Nat's not a certain neighbour but a normal human being for a change. "Yeah, sorry about the mess," she says, throwing bits of clothing off the back of the couch. She'd been airing work shirts, and not doing a very good job of it because they were still wrinkled. But what the hell, she can deal with that later.

"Hey. Try living with a four year old. Compared to my place, this is nothing."

"Right," Penny says. "Of course."

 

~

 

It takes Zoe about thirteen seconds to find Penny's Care Bears, bring each one out into the living room, and present them in turn to the two grown ups. She's like one of those beagles they use to sniff out luggage at the airports. It's pretty damn cute.

"She loves her bears," Nat says, smiling with the tolerance of one who's seen it all before. "You'll probably meet Henry soon."

"Henry?"

"I think he's tucked away in her backpack."

Nat wasn't Penny best friend in high school, but they'd always been in the same circles, gone to the same ballparks to hang out and watch the boys. When Nat's family had moved to Kentucky she'd written down her email address on the back one of her dad's business cards and had stuck it in Penny's diary, next to the entry where she'd drawn a great line of sad faces and the words _Owen Sanderman is a weasel toad I'm never going out with another guy again_ ; and over the next three years they'd sent emails to each other, revealed secrets, hated the world, loved it again, wanted to marry Justin Timberlake. It wasn't pure dedication; they left a lot of stuff out. (Well, Penny had. She liked to think of her life in Pasadena as one huge enormous secret that everyone and their dog knew about, except for Penny, who was finding stuff out in small, manageable pieces. The fact that she was still thinking about her shirts being wrinkled, and how _someone_ would undoubtedly notice the next time they met at the mail boxes, and proceed to tell her if she'd only get around her fear of an ironing board, life would be a lot easier--well, shit, if _that_ didn't reveal something great and significant then nothing would.) But sitting here, watching Zoe cuddle her original Care Bear with the soft tan fur and red heart, while downing some freakishly good coffee that Nat had brought from home, it reinforced things, made them real again.

"Is it hard?" Penny asks.

"Always," Nat says. And she must notice something in Penny's eyes because she nudges her shoulder playfully. "But that's no matter. You learn to deal with stuff." She takes a sip and raises an eyebrow. "Says the woman who got divorced at twenty-three..."

Penny smiles and lifts Zoe and the red heart bear onto her lap. She's got some way to go to equal that.

 

~

 

She'd told Nat about Sheldon and Leonard, of course, but it had felt like giving someone a pep talk on the eve of a large and bloody battle. Be careful of this, don't say that, don't do that, don't ask that. It's better if you're prepared, it's more than most of us get, blah, blah. It had gone on for pages. The fact that ninety-nine per cent of it had been about Sheldon didn't seem to faze Nat, per se, but she had been mighty curious in her pre-visit emails:

 _> > Seriously, Penny? You live in a country with an intergalactic homicide rate, and your greatest fear is someone inadvertently making fun of the locomotive industry? Tell me he isn't that bad. Please._

And the thing was, the thing Penny couldn't work out, was that with each one of those remarks, she found herself writing things like _Hey, it's not that bad_ , all the while wondering if it was possible for a line in a gmail window to actually _sound_ wheedling, and my god, was she really defending trains?

Maybe she should have gone with Howard's suggestion, and get a web-cam installed, so she could introduce them gradually, at a safe distance. (Ignoring Howard's additional suggestions on how to best use it--for god's sake, how did he even _live_ with a woman, even if she was his mother?) But the thought quickly evaporates. She's Queen Penelope, she's braver than that. It's just like pulling off a bandage. Do it quickly, say hi, steer Nat out of target range before Sheldon can launch his usual rapid-fire three thousand question getting-to-know-you assault.

Well. Good luck there, then.

She has the idea of taking Nat and Zoe to the Cheesecake Factory, since she knows Katie is on shift that evening, and can keep little kids so distracted that they forget where they are and stop throwing ice cream, guaranteed.

They make it all the way to the foyer when the plan (oh the plan...so brilliantly conceived, but then Penny had momentarily forgotten that this was Sheldon, and once Sheldon becomes a part of your life, all plans must somehow go through him, as if he were the universe's goddamn ticket inspector) goes all pear-shaped and wrong.

There's the glass doors, there's the outside world, and, as Penny takes Zoe's hand and steers her towards it, there's Sheldon, coming through.

Oh, joy of joys. Penny sucks in a breath, waits for Nat to reach the bottom step, and steadies herself for the barrage to begin.

It doesn't.

Sheldon looks at Penny. He looks from Penny down to Penny's hand, and the small child attached to it.

"Hello," he says. He says it straight to Zoe, peering down from his great gangling height. "I like your shirt."

Zoe's t-shirt has a cat on it, the black silhouette of a cat with paw prints trailing all around the collar. Sheldon bends to examine her more closely. He doesn't kneel like a normal person would, down to little kid level, and he doesn't smile, but he moves like a waiter bowing instead, expression one of typical Sheldon nondisclosure, eyes turned slightly down and head tilted to one side.

Wait--did Sheldon just say he _liked_ something? No lecture on the terrible wrath of the average domestic feline? That this child is wearing only a t-shirt and no jacket as protection from the glorious late evening sunshine?

There is a long moment of silence in which Penny holds her breath without realising it, while Zoe's round eyes gaze up at Sheldon. It dawns on her that this is like the meeting of two absolute innocents, each quite possibly as intelligent as the other, but only one with the ability to voice it. And she knows, somehow, that the greatest irony is that out of all of them, little Zoe, four year old Zoe, is the one most able to understand Sheldon without knowing anything about him. It's all very strange.

Zoe looks at Sheldon, keeps looking at him, and then, finally, her face breaks into a cheeky grin. She giggles, and hides behind Penny's knee.

"Fascinating," Sheldon says, righting himself and glancing from Zoe to Penny to Nat and back again.

"Okay!" Penny's voice is too loud, but whatever. It can't make things any weirder. "Well, we'd better be going--"

"Hang on," says Nat, slowly, in the kind of tone that suggests a penny dropping. "You're Sheldon, right?" She grins widely, a mirror to her daughter, and Penny's stomach drops a little as she realises, too late, where all this is going. Nat looks at Penny, one of _those_ looks, and adds, "Okay, you're coming with us, I'm not taking no for an answer."

There is a flicker of unease in Sheldon's eyes, giving Penny a moment of hope. There's no way he's just going to accept the invitation of a stranger. ( _It's Thursday night_ , she tells herself. _He's not going to eat out on a Thursday night. Anything-can-happen-Thursday has always been anything-can-happen-Thursday as long as it's the same thing every Thursday...right?_

 _Yeah, wish again, Penny_ , she thinks. _That's about as convincing as your last audition_.)

"After all," adds Nat, smiling beatifically at Sheldon while Penny tries to hide against the wall. "Isn't today Thursday?"

"It is..."

"And as we know, anything can happen on Thursdays."

He actually looks impressed. "How very astute your friend is, Penny," Sheldon says, as he holds open the door and they all trail out. "I rarely meet someone who not only knows my likes and dislikes before they have even been disclosed, but who adorns their offspring in clothing patterned with Fibonacci's numbers. What a striking coincidence."

Penny releases Zoe's hand back to her mother, waits with a beaming, very fake smile until they're ahead and out of hearing distance, and then leans back and hisses through clenched teeth, "What the hell, Sheldon! They're paw prints!"

"Yes, in a very obvious numerical sequence," he says slowly. He gives her a look of perfect, Sheldon-brand apathy. "Well, I can see what tonight's dinner conversation is going to have to be about."

 

~

 

Nat lets Penny put Zoe to bed. Well, it's not so much lets as sees the pained look on Penny's face and tells to her go read a book to Zoe in a desperate attempt to put the evening out of her mind. And it works, in a way. The words don't mean anything really, they're just letters on pages with bright shapes all around, but she reads them aloud in a quiet voice, while Zoe's small body wriggles under her comforter and another Care Bear, the yellow one this time, peeks out next to her chin. Henry's there, too, just as Nat had said, a very plain and very small bear with the appearance of being washed many times and hugged even more. After five pages Penny realises that Zoe's fallen asleep, but she stays there, reading, until she gets to the end. Happy stories; she wonders why the bright and happy things make her sad.

She joins Nat on the couch. There's a tub of vanilla ice cream on the table, two spoons, and Penny licks the end of one thoughtfully. But it hasn't gotten to the nice melty stage yet, and the cold sticks to her tongue.

"He's a strange one," Nat says, after a while.

Penny doesn't have to ask. "He is that," she says.

Nat's looking at her, slumped a little, in a way that makes Penny think she's being observed from a far away distance. "Do you like him?" Nat asks.

A snort sends little drops of ice cream onto Penny's lap. She wipes at her jeans, thankful that it's only vanilla and not her tub of double chocolate ripple. The knowledge that what she's going to say and what she really thinks might actually be two very different things makes her avoid Nat's gaze. "What do you mean?"

"He's kind of cute."

"You're kidding. Nat, seriously, did we just spend the last two hours in difference universes? Didn't you hear what he was talking about?"

Nat shrugs. "So he's chatty. It could be worse."

Penny laughs hollowly. "No, no, we are so not going there. Sheldon does not 'chat'. Sheldon _talks_. Sheldon _lectures_. Sheldon tells the world and its goddamn neighbours everything they don't want to know about everything they never asked." She jabs her spoon into the tub and sucks it clean. "It can't be worse because it _is_ worse."

"Sweetie, all I heard was mumble mumble let's go hide our secrets in ice cream." She pulls air quotes and laughs at the look Penny gives her.

"Well, that is something I'm rather good at," Penny says, "if I do say so myself."

"Poor thing. You must go through a hell of a lot."

"Shut up."

They sit in silence, watching the TV without any sound. The click of a door opening and closing drifts through, the distant jangle of keys; Leonard's home. He's been working late for the last week, a fact that Sheldon hasn't hesitated to complain about at every opportunity. Except he hadn't mentioned Leonard once tonight, nor his work. Now she thinks about it, he hadn't said anything remotely scientific at all. How odd. Well, apart from Fibonacci. There was a lot of talk about him.

"I'm going to be dreaming about some Italian guy who liked numbers," Penny murmurs sleepily. "And who's dead. What does that say about my life?"

"That it's not all bad," Nat says, patting her on the arm. She looks carefully at Penny, and gets up with a grunt. "Enjoy those dreams."

 

~

 

The day after next, Penny drives them to the train station, and of course ( _of course_ ) Sheldon insists on coming. She hugs Nat and hoists Zoe onto her hip, smiles into the curls and kisses her until she squirms.

Zoe looks up at Sheldon, holds out Henry for his paw to be shaken. "Goodbye bear," Sheldon says with a frown, as if they're sending off a child to boarding school. "Do not be sad, you are leaving by train. From my reckoning very few creatures of the wild share that experience."

Large, dark eyes follow Sheldon's to the carriage window. A hand waves through the glass, and they're gone.

 

~

 

A month later, she gets an email. Just a few lines, thanking her for the stay and dinner and letting Zoe meet someone who might one day be very famous, for good and important reasons.

Then, at the end:

 _> > Penny, I think he's OK. You might have something there._

Penny stares at the laptop, thinking. She sits very still, and lets it close.


End file.
